Is MoveOn Moving Over?

• The BuzzFeed line: "MoveOn’s fadeout from the center of the Washington conversation isn’t an accident. It’s one part necessity — the group found it impossible to compete with Obama for attention and love, and thrived more in opposition — and one part a controversial decision to allow its “members,” as it calls subscribers to its giant email list, to use MoveOn as an enabler and technical platform for its own campaigns."

• See Our previous coverage for an explanation of MoveOn's new model.

Twitter won't save you

• The New York Times yesterday hammered Newark Mayor Cory Booker's reputation as the "superhero mayor," to borrow comedian Jon Stewart's words. In a profile, the Times takes a big swing at Booker's gubernatorial aspirations by painting him as a man who spends more time engaging in made-for-social-media stunts than in the actual governance of Newark — and implies he's a carpetbagger to boot, calling him "[a] Stanford- and Yale-educated son of the suburbs" who "arrived to suspicion when he moved into the Newark projects and made his unsuccessful first run for mayor."

  Despite accomplishments like reducing the city's structural deficit, the Times' Kate Zernike writes, Newark residents believe he has left too much work unfinished in his troubled city while flying off to hobnob with jet-setting elites. Zernike applies this coup de grâce to Booker, who has appeared at Personal Democracy Media events in the past to discuss social media's role in politics:

  Asked about complaints from residents and business owners that garbage is not picked up, abandoned buildings are not boarded up and public spaces are in disrepair, the mayor talked about a new system that allows him to track which streets need snowplows and which departments are paying for too much overtime — even when he is out of town.

  He invited a reporter to see the system in action. He then called to apologize that he could not be there: “I’m in and out of New York all day.”

  Instead, his staff demonstrated the system. Mr. Booker was on his way to host a reading at a bookstore on the Upper West Side, filmed by CNN. He then spoke at a benefit at Cipriani and attended a movie premiere at Google’s New York headquarters. Afterward, he announced on Twitter, “I sat on a panel with Richard Branson.”

  A note on New Jersey expectations: Your First POST editor did a brief stint at a newspaper in nearby Jersey City, where the sitting mayor has been photographed nude on his front porch "after a night of drinking" and been charged with various minor offenses stemming from this or that altercation. Booker replaces Sharpe James, who was convicted on federal fraud charges and sentenced to prison. Corruption and malfeasance in New Jersey is the stuff of legend. Booker has been tweeting up a storm to establish that Newark doesn't work that way, but he has to deliver to constituents still weighing success on the scales of the state's pork-slinging past.

WCIT Watch

• The World Conference on International Telecommunications ending today in Dubai would not be such a threat to the current model of Internet governance, which advocates call an "open, inclusive" and "multi-stakeholder" model, if that model did a better job of including voices from the developing world. Your First POST editor digs in:

  "The reason why these challenges to the existing system keep coming up," says Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked, "and the reason why the authoritarian countries like China and Russia and Iran keep getting support, keep managing to get support from developing countries, many of which are democratic to different degrees, is because they make the argument successfully that ICANN is full of white people in the developed world speaking English, and increasingly that's not what the Internet-using world looks like."

  MacKinnon still says the ITU is not the right forum for conversations about Internet issues, and that the "multistakeholder" model really is open and inclusive. It's just not open and inclusive enough ... [ICANN's] chief executive officer, newly appointed this year, is Fadi Chehadé, a citizen of Egypt, Lebanon, and the United States. But of ICANN's 20 other board members, 11 are white European men and four are white European women. ICANN's last organizational meeting, in October, was in Toronto.

• After a majority of countries favored a resolution to give the U.N. a more "active role" in governing the Internet and China, Algeria, and Iran refused to back human rights language favored by the U.S., U.S. representatives said they could not sign the treaty in its current form.

  The New York Times noted that the U.S. did achieve "several critical victories" with the removal of proposals that would require Internet companies to pay telecommunications companies for traffic. .Nxt suggested that Internet activism had "humbled" the ITU conference. U.S. lawmakers approved of the U.S. stance on the treaty. Reuters reported that the Internet had turned the conference into a "reality show." @opWCIT, a Twitter account associated with Anonymous, was monitoring the developments and encouraging followers to contact their country delegates and encourage them not to sign. Other activists created an online map showing which countries supported the treaty and which rejected it.

Elections and their discontents

• Your First POST editor suggests that when American elections officials talk about how to fix an Election Day experience that has become uneven and in some cases unjust, they are talking about a problem that some engineers are using the Internet's bottom-up methodology in an attempt to solve:

  "Lack of uniformity in laws and application of laws [are undermining the elections process]," Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat, said Tuesday during a conversation with another outgoing secretary of state, Sam Reed, Republican of Washington.

  Meanwhile, the secretaries of state agreed, members of political parties constantly jockey for an advantage by seeking to influence election law in their favor ...

  Here and there people are starting to think up possible solutions. The non-profit start-up TurboVote, for example, just received a $150,000 grant from the Rita Allen Foundation to design a back-end system that officials could use to process voter registrations online ... The new idea is to develop a mechanism by which this information goes straight into the databases of elections officials. In theory, this saves time, increases the quality of voter registration data, and means the only important thing for the voter to do is send along a copy of his or her signature on the registration form ... "Really we're focused on cities and towns," [TurboVote co-founder Seth] Flaxman said.

• Meanwhile, in Ghana, a top-down idea — requiring voters to identify themselves biometrically, with a fingerprint — seems to have been successful, despite a few technological glitches. Gabriela Barnuevo, a journalist based in Ghana, reports for WeGov:

  Waiting in line to vote for a second day, Patricia Kadua, 28, told techPresident, “For free and fair elections, I prefer the machines. They will help the electoral process, but for me it is very painful to have to come back again.”

  Garry Palmer, a voter waiting patiently in one of the long lines at a polling station, said he did not “… know too much about [the] machines, just that they don’t work. We have more transparency, but we lost efficiency.”

  The Electoral Commission introduced the biometric identifiers as a means of preventing a recurrence of incidents that marred the 2008 elections, when there were allegations of fraudulent voter registration and ballot stuffing.

Around the web

• According to a video from The Action featuring Santa Claus running into Paul Ryan, the congressman has been very naughty. The video encourages viewers to contact members of Congress to extend middle-class tax cuts. House Democrats have been popularizing the hashtag #dotherighthing to back the extension. Earlier, Buzzfeed looked at how Democrats were "trolling" Republicans in the fiscal cliff debate on Twitter.

• American counterterrorism officials are now able to gather millions of records about U.S. citizens, including many not suspected of any crime, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chris Calabrese offered some commentary on the report for the ACLU.

• The Sunlight Foundation has created Sitegeist, an application that provides information on a person's location such as demographics, housing, popular places and weather, drawing on a variety of data sources including the U.S. Census and Yelp.

• Code for America announced that the teams behind ToledoWiki and Anchorage Adopt-a-Hydrant were the "grand winners" of the Race for Reuse, an initiative to bring existing civic apps to new cities.

• The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a location privacy bill backed by Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.)

• The CIO Council has released a new report detailing the use of mobile technology in the federal government.

• ProPublica’s Amanda Zamora shares the lessons the news site drew from its Free the Files effort to gather political ad files from TV stations.

• Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press, criticizes the tenure of FCC chair Julius Genachowski.

• In a Wired article, Susan Crawford argues that "It’s Time to Fix the Pitifully Slow, Expensive Internet Access in the U.S."

• Seattle plans to set up its own gigabit broadband network in partnership with Gigabit Squared.

• Google executive Eric Schmidt says Google is looking to expand its Google Fiber program.

• Video from the Exploring the Digital Election event hosted by Google and CNN is now available.

• Privacy International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Google have contributed to draft international principles on communication surveillance and human rights.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently launched a new NSA Domestic Spying Guide.

• Google executive Eric Schmidt defended the company's tax strategy, which reportedly involves a tax shelter in Bermuda. A Wall Street Journal column also defended the tax approach of the companies, attributing it to higher tax rates supported by politicians.

• Twitter is offering expanded advertising options.

• Under a pilot program, New Yorkers can now hail a cab via a smartphone application, a move welcomed by Uber

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• WNYC reported on how crowdfunding has helped Hurricane Sandy relief.

International

• The wife of the British Commons Speaker is facing a high court dispute after a Conservative Party politician is demanding £50,000 libel damages over a tweet that implicated him in a sexual abuse case in connection with what turned out to be false BBC report.

• The Guardian lets British readers look up new census data from their local area.

• New South Wales in Australia has launched a new OpenGov portal.

• A Syrian rebel group linked with Al Qaida is arguing on Twitter with WordPress after one of its blogs was suspended for allegedly violating terms of service.

• A new online campaign is aimed at freeing Bassel Khartabil, a software engineer detained in Syria.

• Apple and publishers have settled an EU e-book investigation without fines.

• Reuters recently reported how African countries are stifling telecom development by not selling more mobile bandwidth to mobile phone operators.

• The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence recently published a National Cyber Security Framework Manual.

• The World Bank's Development Research Group has published a complete dataset of Global Financial Inclusion data. "This translates to over 150,000 individual-level observations, representing adults in 148 economies and 97 percent of the world’s adult population," according to a blog post.

• The United Nations Development Programme has helped develop new online tools to help people with disabilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a new Twitter account in Arabic, "aimed at strengthening dialogue w/ Arab media and public opinion."

• A post by the library of the European Parliament gives advice on human rights information research resources.